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Accepted Paper:

Panchayat politics and translocal discourses of development  
Stefanie Strulik (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies,Geneva)

Paper short abstract:

The paper will look into the normative amalgamation of modernization, development and democracy discourses in the context of the panchayati raj reform in India. It will address both, locales and routes through which knowledge is accessed, produced and dispersed as aspects of space reconfigured in the context of policy intervention.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will look into the normative amalgamation of modernization, development and democracy discourses in the context of the panchayati raj reform (73rd Amendment) in India. While the central government, despite a rhetoric of devolution, aims at increasing control over remote rural areas and seek to deliver development more efficiently, from the other end, the reform seems to offer new avenues to have a share of the development cake - not seldom a share for one's own pocket as well.

The paper, which focuses on the 33% women's quota entailed in the reforms, will make references to two different aspects of space. For one it looks at the actual physical space in which meanings of development are negotiated. It is argued that these locales (as varied as panchayat bhawans or matrimonial beds) are not a neutral container space, but that the meanings of such locales are socially constructed and re-negotiated under the exigencies of the panchayat reforms. The second aspect of space addressed refers to the networks and routes, i.e. the social spaces through which knowledge is accessed, produced and dispersed and how on the way a reform, couched in the language of democracy and development, gets translated into rural northern Indian realities of every day politics. The two aspects of space are then brought together with the argument that the social production of physical and social space concurrently play a central role in the negotiation of gender relations.

Panel P09
Developing control: the reconfiguration of space and the making of development on the ground
  Session 1